Notes From a Sober Runner #3

I’m sitting on an exam table covered in paper, my legs dangling over the edge as I try to process the words coming out of my doctor’s mouth. Possible stress fracture. Physical therapy. I nod my head automatically to the cadence of her speech. There’s a yellow smudge on her white surgical mask. My eyes fixate on it.“Unless this marathon is really important to you, I wouldn’t run it.” A week earlier, such a proclamation would have completely derailed me. I made the doctor’s appointment expecting the worst. An annoying ache along the inside of my left shin while running had transformed into a sharp, indisputable pain while doing pretty much anything involving my legs. I had made it to the half marathon distance in my training, but that’s as far as I got. Any attempts to run in the weeks after, even just a few miles around my neighborhood,resulted in pain. Ice, rest, percussive massage, calf stretches—I tried every shin splint remedy, to no avail. Even a slow mile on the treadmill, purposely set to an incline to lessen the stress on my shins, triggered near immediate pain.
It became increasingly clear that it was unlikely I’d be able to recover and resume my training with enough time to be ready for the marathon. I struggled with the question of whether or not I was giving up too easily, if backing off from my training was a sign of some weakness on my part. It’s difficult for me to walk away from something—I don’t like to think of myself as somebody who quits things, but the reality of the situation was that I was quickly running out of time, and I couldn’t even run around the block without significant discomfort. I made the appointment with the sports medicine doctor because on some level I needed a professional to validate my decision to preserve my ego.
On the morning of April 1st, the day of my doctor’s appointment, I wake up to a text from my mom: Call me when you wake up. My mom’s about as far from a helicopter mom as they come, and she’s certainly never been one to text me at six in the morning. I instantly feel nauseous. If you’ve never been in the position of having to make a phone call with the sick intuition that you’re about to be the recipient of life-changing news, it’s both surreal and laughably mundane. It’s April Fool’s Day. I’m standing in the middle of my living room in my pajamas, my hand holding the phone up to my tangled hair, as my mom explains that my grandfather passed away in his sleep early that morning.
While I recognize that, as a woman in her late twenties, I’m fortunate to still have any living grandparents at all, I wasn’t prepared to lose my Pépère (Quebecois for grandfather). My mom was young when she had me, and her father was in his early seventies when he passed. My mom’s parents, my Mémère and Pépère, felt like another arm of my nuclear family growing up. Just a few minutes down the road from us in Buena Park, California, they were a presence at every school event, every holiday, every minor get together. Though he’d become something of a conspiracy theorist in recent years (and we exchanged more than a few heated texts and emails over our differences of opinion), my Pépère was a fixture in my life, and though he’d been in and out of the hospital over the last few years for various mysterious ailments, I’d never honestly considered that he’d be gone from it anytime soon.
The rest of the day passes oddly, as though time’s hanging in the air, my body making lazy ripples as I pass through it. The nurse at the doctor’s office exhibits a level of bubbliness that I’m unprepared for, and I find myself disingenuously answering “pretty good” when she asks how I’m doing. I don’t know how to even begin to answer the question honestly, and there’s no elegant way to say “I just found out my grandpa died” to a young woman with Hello Kitty stickers on her name badge. After the appointment, I drive out of the hospital’s parking garage,my brain skipping forward, unable to piece together any kind of continuity of thought. My partner and I drive to Menifee to be with my Mémère that afternoon, to try to hold space for her grief as best we can.
In the coming weeks, I begin to process my Pépère’s death. It’s perhaps the first time that I’ve been present for something of this emotional magnitude in my adult life. I spend an entire Friday evening pacing around my house, not quite knowing what to do with myself. The double-edged sword of sobriety, as I’m sure many of you will know, is that you get to fully experience your emotions, unsoftened by the fuzz of a few beers on the couch or cheap cocktails at a dive bar with friends. The downside of this is that, well, you have to fully experience your emotions,and sometimes my emotions suck to experience. And while I certainly have a tendency to seek out alternate ways by which I can numb my own boredom and discomfort (I refused to download TikTok because I know that it would be my downfall, and then Instagram had to go and come out with Reels, so that’s cool), I’m able to stay relatively present through this for both myself and my family in a way that I almost certainly would not have while I was drinking.Thirty days after his death, we bury my Pépère. His friends crack jokes about his strange beliefs at the celebration of life (one friend jokes that he’s probably up in heaven right now, still looking for JFK Jr.). I hug family members I haven’t seen in years, drawn together by tragedy but glad to be together. We eat pasta and garlic bread at the VFW and rifle through old pictures,laughing at perms and huge mustaches.
My running shoes sit on the shoe rack, untouched, for the entire month of April. I’d be more upset about it, but, cliché as it might be, I’m just grateful to be here. Death offers us perspective, I suppose. I learn that I don’t have a stress fracture, and I start going to physical therapy, but the path forward is long and uncertain. I try (with varying degrees of success) to let go of any expectations of myself, but it’s easier said than done.I often think about the irony of starting a series of essays on running and sobriety, only to end up sidelined by injury. Though I know that virtually every runner goes through periods where, for one reason or another, they’re unable to run, it still feels like a loss of an identity. I don’t subscribe to the belief that everything happens for a reason or that every difficult experience is an opportunity for self-actualization. I reject the idea that struggle must be followed by growth, that we must frame our experiences in a satisfying narrative for consumption. It would be easy to tie this essay up with a bow, to artfully craft some kind of conclusion tying the death of my grandfather to my inability to run (in an earlier version, I caught myself building towards exactly that), but to do so would massively trivialize his death and misrepresent my reality.
My Pépère is gone, and it sucks. I don’t know how long it will be until I’m able to run without pain, but I’m learning to live within that uncertainty, because living within uncertainty is still living, and nothing is certain. I don’t know what the next installment in this series will look like, but I’m choosing to be optimistic. I figure that if I have to choose how I move through this world, I might as well do so with hope. I know that at any moment I might find myself standing in my living room again in my pajama pants and an oversized t-shirt, hand shaking slightly, the unwilling recipient of bad news. But I also know there’s a future where I’m running along the lake near my house, the smell of eucalyptus hanging in the cool morning air, unburdened by pain. None of us can know how things will shake out, but that’s the future I’m holding out hope for.

About Aubrey:
Aubrey Zepeda is a scientist by day and a physical therapy patient by morning. When she's not setting up experiments in the lab or getting her ass kicked by squats, you can find her either at the climbing gym or in bed with a book. She is currently living in San Diego with her partner and their dog, who is a very good boy.

Instagram: @aubreyz_writes